1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a lighter, and more particularly to a piezoelectric lighter, wherein an actuation button is arranged to normally receive and hide in a lighter casing so as to prevent the lighter from being accidentally ignited.
2. Description of Related Arts
Lighters are widely utilized for rapidly and conveniently acquiring controlled ignition. As a matter of conventional art, basing on the respective mechanism for generating ignition, there exist two board categories of lighters, namely flint lighters and piezoelectric lighters. For both categories, the user's operation is essentially the same, i.e. the user has to push an actuation button provided on the lighter casing to ignite the lighter. Because of the ease of this actuation procedure, very often, the lighters are unintentionally or accidentally ignited by, say, a child of the lighter owner.
Therefore, handfuls of safety devices are developed to incorporate into the conventional lighters so as to prevent accidental or unintentional ignition, especially by minors who do have the capability to appreciate what might be a disastrous consequence of abusing the lighter. Those so called safety devices are founded on a general principle, that is, locking the depressive movement of the actuation button in order to prevent ignition, until the actuation button is manually unlocked, after which the lighter can then be normally ignited. As a matter of fact, the mechanism for locking the actuation buttons are indeed plentiful, most of which have achieved satisfactory outcome, at least in terms of preventing unintentional ignitions.
However, the reality is that most lighters manufacturers are somewhat driven by the commercial world so that their safety devices are largely compromised by the requirement of marketability which is usually translated into such things as convenience ignition and easy unlocking. As a result, a tension inevitably exists between marketability and the effectiveness of the safety devices, which should be pinpointed by the difficulty for unlocking the actuation button. The dilemma is that in order to achieve good marketability, it should not be too difficult for the actuation button being unlocked, at the same time however, the easier the actuation button can be unlocked, the less effective the safety device is for preventing unintentional or minor ignition.
Another inherent shortcoming of conventional lighters is that it is almost inevitable that children, and of course adults, would recognize that what is a lighter, even though the actuation button thereof is locked, and this attracts exploration of how to unlock the actuation, probably driven by human curiosity. It is submitted that, if the children do not recognize a particular physical object is actually a lighter, even though they have that lighter at hands, they may not even go on to explore how to unlock the actuation button, and it is likely that they would lose interest to that object very fast and put it aside. Of course, if their parents keep the lighter well out of the children, the chance of the children contacting the lighter would be lower, and this means the chance of the children accidentally igniting the lighter would be at best remote.